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UX Fails – Welcome to Adobe

I love good UX. Making good UX is a result of a lot of consideration, it’s not hard, it’s just not something you can slap together without thinking.
Here a typical fail you can quickly change into a win.

Two mistakes stand out, but first one is connected to a good practice: „Why do you need this?” Users often ask this question and if they are not satisfied with the answer they will lie making your data ultimately useless — unless you don’t care and you need just +1 record in your DB to fulfill some stupid management stupid KPIs (yes, ther’re both stupid that way).

I thought: „Oh, how nice, I don’t need to guest the answer!” But Oh wait it’s link to a whole Adobe Privacy Policy document — who does have time to read that just now, right?

Usually I would ignore reading that, and answered this questions myself (Adobe fail): „You don’t really need that, so I will lie.” But, as I write this post I decided to check the actual answer, and there isn’t one, which is even bigger fail.

The second fail: „Please contact me via email”, is an outright lie on Adobe part. I would like to be contacted via email, I prefer this way of contact, but this is not about contact, this is about sending me marketing stuff, which is stated in the paragraph above nicely separated so you wouldn’t read it and fall for to the „contact me” trap.

This is what GDPR was introduced for

GDPR is about giving people control of their data and when you ask for consent you can not do that under false pretence and trick users into giving you one — it won’t be valid anyway and you maybe fined for that. It’s not about what you write in the long leagal fine print that nobody reads, its what your users understood under normal and usual circumstances. Be careful about trickery it come back to hurt you, there are fines now.

How to correct there simple mistakes

Here date of birth is required, so unless you really, really need to make it optional and provide popup with a short explanation of why you need that and how user will benefit from providing a correct information — they will lie otherwise.

There plenty of time to collect more data

You don’t need to collect all needed data here and now. You can advertise your marketing email inside the service and provide incentives to subscribe. You can collect date of birth just before users are about to use a feature that requires it.

GDPR is also about purposefulness and not hoarding data just on a whim so you maybe can use it later for whatever — it’s exactly why GDPR is here, so you have to know and tell users why, how before you collect data and start using it.